Would ion cannons affect ST ships?

[nasor]

Those are both the result of nuclear processes that don't really have anything to do with ionization, so I’m not sure why either would be called ‘ion radiation poisoning’.

well Alfa radiation is electrons and Beta is ionized helium(without the electrons) . Gamma is the only one that wouldn't be a byproduct of inionzation, since it EM radiation.

Alpha particles are helium nuclei and beta particles are electrons or positrons, but simply ionizing some helium doesn't give you a bunch of alpha and beta particles. They're dangerous because the nuclear decay process that creates them imparts them with very high energies.

[Connor MacLeod]

Those are both the result of nuclear processes that don't really have anything to do with ionization, so I’m not sure why either would be called ‘ion radiation poisoning’.

well Alfa radiation is electrons and Beta is ionized helium(without the electrons) . Gamma is the only one that wouldn't be a byproduct of inionzation, since it EM radiation.

Alpha particles are helium nuclei and beta particles are electrons or positrons, but simply ionizing some helium doesn't give you a bunch of alpha and beta particles. They're dangerous because the nuclear decay process that creates them imparts them with very high energies.

Yes, and what makes you think an ion cannon barrage doesn't have high energies? They have to be capable of penetrating shields somehow, and "technobabble mechanisms" ain't it.

[Ender]

Those are both the result of nuclear processes that don't really have anything to do with ionization, so I’m not sure why either would be called ‘ion radiation poisoning’.

well Alfa radiation is electrons and Beta is ionized helium(without the electrons) . Gamma is the only one that wouldn't be a byproduct of inionzation, since it EM radiation.

Alpha particles are helium nuclei and beta particles are electrons or positrons, but simply ionizing some helium doesn't give you a bunch of alpha and beta particles. They're dangerous because the nuclear decay process that creates them imparts them with very high energies.

Yes dipshit. Now exactly how are they going to trigger the EMP we observe if they are NOT high energy particles? Calling it ion radiation is correct.

[The Silence and I]

The Defiant has lost power on more than one occasion IIRC without core breach too. The magnetic fields are supposedly based on superconducting coils, and do not degrade. A simple loss of power should not be a problem, although other conditions may cause the fields to degrade for no good RL reason.

Wouldn't help. The coils may be superconducting, but the cooling system to keep their temperature low enough to maintain superconductivity still needs power. They probably use batteries to maintain the containment. StarTrek can store energy at high densities for large periods of time, it seems. A large bank of batteries could keep the fields on the antimatter storage and warp core working.

However, none of that matters if the batteries themselves get their shit ruined by the Ion Cannon blast. Then they are dicked.

A room temperature superconductor would suffer minimal field loss over time; I am not positive the Feds have room temperature supercondutors, but considering the crazy technology they have I place this well within the realm of possible. Anyone know definitively if they do or do not have such materials?

[Gil Hamilton]

A room temperature superconductor would suffer minimal field loss over time; I am not positive the Feds have room temperature supercondutors, but considering the crazy technology they have I place this well within the realm of possible. Anyone know definitively if they do or do not have such materials?

Why would we assume they've got magic superconductors based on the premise that the Federation has got some crazy shit? This thread is the first time I heard they used superconductors at all, let alone magic ones.

[nasor]

So how does impacting a bunch of fast-moving positive ions with the ship cause an EMP?

[Isolder74]

So how does impacting a bunch of fast-moving positive ions with the ship cause an EMP?

It might work this way.

The huge positive charge would repell all free electrons in any metalic object. That would force then a distance away from the impact site. Fairly quickly the positive charge would dispate and the electrons would try and return to equalization forming an EMP from about the point of impact.

[nasor]

It might work this way.

The huge positive charge would repell all free electrons in any metalic object. That would force then a distance away from the impact site. Fairly quickly the positive charge would dispate and the electrons would try and return to equalization forming an EMP from about the point of impact.

Maybe, but I doubt that being hit by a beam of cations would cause that sort of effect. I suspect that they would just bounce off (or blow pieces of the ship off) without moving many electrons around.

Do we know that the ion cannon isn’t just some sort of big particle beam weapon? Maybe it just uses magnetic fields (or whatever) to accelerate ions to high velocities and then shoots them at a target, causing damage because of the kinetic energy transfer?

[Ender]

It might work this way.

The huge positive charge would repell all free electrons in any metalic object. That would force then a distance away from the impact site. Fairly quickly the positive charge would dispate and the electrons would try and return to equalization forming an EMP from about the point of impact.

Maybe, but I doubt that being hit by a beam of cations would cause that sort of effect. I suspect that they would just bounce off (or blow pieces of the ship off) without moving many electrons around.

Particle beam research says otherwise. Read one sources on Mike's plasma page.

Do we know that the ion cannon isn’t just some sort of big particle beam weapon? Maybe it just uses magnetic fields (or whatever) to accelerate ions to high velocities and then shoots them at a target, causing damage because of the kinetic energy transfer?

That seems to be the case as near as I can tell. The thing is that EMPs are a tertiary effect of PB weapons. Apparently Ion canbnons are structured in some way to produce massive EMPs. Too much of the real material is still classified to guess at how.

[Isolder74]

Of it could possible that it is designed to work around SW shields. The affect appears to resonate of the ship's shields. Whatever the effect it appears that the Ions are the cause of it.

[nasor]

Particle beam research says otherwise. Read one sources on Mike's plasma page.

The sources on Mike's plasma page are quite explicit about the EMP effect only occurring in the atmosphere - not in space.

Here’s a guess about how the SW ion cannon might create an EMP. The cannon must generate some sort of ‘confinement field’ around the ion beam, because otherwise the repulsive forces within the beam would cause it to dissipate shortly after leaving the cannon. If the beam of ions was moving very quickly and the ions were very highly charged, then when they struck their target you would get a compressing 'pinch effect’ as the ions get stopped by the target and begin to pile up but are unable to spread out sideways because of the confinement beam. This could create a large, sudden increase in the flux density around where the beam was striking, which could produce an EMP. The only problem is that I believe most of the EMP would be directed outward in the plane of the target that the ions were striking. But if you were firing at an irregularly-shaped target it might still catch a lot of the pulse.

[Ender]

Particle beam research says otherwise. Read one sources on Mike's plasma page.

The sources on Mike's plasma page are quite explicit about the EMP effect only occurring in the atmosphere - not in space.

You do realize that as the Beam penetrates the target, it is going to do the same thing there instead of in atmosphere, right?

[nasor]

You do realize that as the Beam penetrates the target, it is going to do the same thing there instead of in atmosphere, right?

I believe that the EMP effect that Mike's sources were referring to has to do with the charged particles spiraling around in the earth's magnetic field after being ionized by the beam's passing, like the EMP from a nuclear weapon.

[Connor MacLeod]

Particle beam research says otherwise. Read one sources on Mike's plasma page.

The sources on Mike's plasma page are quite explicit about the EMP effect only occurring in the atmosphere - not in space.

You do realize that as the Beam penetrates the target, it is going to do the same thing there instead of in atmosphere, right?

There's also going to be secondary radiation generated from the superheating and ionization of the target material.

I believe electromagnetic induction has been mentioned to me somewhere before as a possible mechanism for damage via an ion cannon.

[Ender]

You do realize that as the Beam penetrates the target, it is going to do the same thing there instead of in atmosphere, right?

I believe that the EMP effect that Mike's sources were referring to has to do with the charged particles spiraling around in the earth's magnetic field after being ionized by the beam's passing, like the EMP from a nuclear weapon.

No. It has to do with the ions the radiation produces interacting with the surrounding atoms. Like the essay says, this is generally ignored outside the atmosphere, because there if you hit the target, you pretty much are just going to kill it. But in Star Wars the size and durability of the target changes that. It can survive a hit for a little bit, so an EMP gets triggered.

[Connor MacLeod]

You do realize that as the Beam penetrates the target, it is going to do the same thing there instead of in atmosphere, right?

I believe that the EMP effect that Mike's sources were referring to has to do with the charged particles spiraling around in the earth's magnetic field after being ionized by the beam's passing, like the EMP from a nuclear weapon.

No. It has to do with the ions the radiation produces interacting with the surrounding atoms. Like the essay says, this is generally ignored outside the atmosphere, because there if you hit the target, you pretty much are just going to kill it. But in Star Wars the size and durability of the target changes that. It can survive a hit for a little bit, so an EMP gets triggered.

Its also possible they deliberately reduce the damage capability of the weapon in some instances (for example, the "non damaging" ion burst might be a less cohesive discharge, so that the particle charge strtikes over a much larger surface area. It might also possess a lower kinetic energy value than a "deadly" shot.)

[Ender]

The sources on Mike's plasma page are quite explicit about the EMP effect only occurring in the atmosphere - not in space.

You do realize that as the Beam penetrates the target, it is going to do the same thing there instead of in atmosphere, right?

There's also going to be secondary radiation generated from the superheating and ionization of the target material.

I believe electromagnetic induction has been mentioned to me somewhere before as a possible mechanism for damage via an ion cannon.

Yeah, someone tossed out masers as a possible explanation.

Ion cannos are hard to explain because the mechanism they might theoretically explain (PB triggering an EMP), while possilbe, really shouldn't happen. Anything strong enough to punch through a shield should kill it instantly too. Which means it should be specialized somehow that the EMP effects are magnified. As was suggested, it might have something to do with shields. If shields have a physical component as suggested by some of the evidence, it makes much more sense.

Of course, then you still have the problem of the tracer moving at different speeds, including a velocity that means it should be falling back towards Hoth instead of hitting the Tyrant.

[NRS Guardian]

An ion cannon could be similar to a Neutral Particle Beam cannon, and before you say it wouldn't qualify as an ion cannon because ions aren't neutral particles, or that you can't accelerate neutral particles, let me explain. An NPB accelerates negative ions using magnetic fields and in order to prevent beam diffusion (as someone mentioned is a problem with charged particles) and the negative ions are stripped of their charge before leaving the cannon(another reason for stripping the negative charge is to prevent the beam from being pulled towards the Earth's magnetic field). NPB cannons don't do physical damage but instead pass throught the target and disrupt the electrical systems of the target, also an object hit by a particle beam emits gamma rays and neutrons in proportion to its mass and size. Before anyone asks if NPB weapons are possible both the Los Alamos and Brookhaven Laboratories were experimenting and meeting with success in the early 90s and the USSR was experimenting with them as well.

[Enola Straight]

How similar is the Ion Cannon strike compared to a strike from a Quantum Filament?

[apocolypse]

It's funny this thread came up because one of the debates I'm in over at SB has some people claiming that there's no way to know if the cannon will affect ST ships, as "we don't know the strength and intensity of the storm", or something along that line.

[Ender]

It's funny this thread came up because one of the debates I'm in over at SB has some people claiming that there's no way to know if the cannon will affect ST ships, as "we don't know the strength and intensity of the storm", or something along that line.

Well, the thing is that they have a point: We don't know if they have Farraday cages over their stuff or to what strength those cages can hold up. They may be rated against GT level EMPs or something for all we know. It's probably low MT (I don't figure their weapons are beyond 20 MT and I have higher end expectations then most) but the fact that their equipment blows up some times may be because of the EMP knocking out the equipment maintaining the plasma containment field and pressure and expansion taking over from there.

But since Ion cannons also do brute force damage per ESB and Daala's attack on the Dantooine colony, it's kind of a moot point.

[Utah Jak]

Questions: What about the angle from which the Ion blast hits? Would the blast head in a straight line or spread out like it did in TESB?

[kinkade0001]

It's funny this thread came up because one of the debates I'm in over at SB has some people claiming that there's no way to know if the cannon will affect ST ships, as "we don't know the strength and intensity of the storm", or something along that line.

More to the point, we don't know how an Ion Cannon will affect a Duotronic computer network. Federation computers, the EPS system, and fiber optic systems, along with most of the isolinear control networks are not electrical in nature. Essentially Federation ships use a type of Quantum computer. Later ships have begun to incorporate bio neural gel as a medium for processing data, but again, we have no way of knowing how a ion cannon designed to short out an electrical system will effect these. During the Dominion war Breen Energy disruptors were able to disable Federation ships, but not Klingon ships; the technology was dissimilar enough that the disruptor had no effect. Later in the war the Federation was able to modify the deflectors to prevent the Energy drain.
So to sum this up, we don't know what would happen, if the ship would loose power, or if the systems are even affected by an ion cannon at all.

[Ender]

It's funny this thread came up because one of the debates I'm in over at SB has some people claiming that there's no way to know if the cannon will affect ST ships, as "we don't know the strength and intensity of the storm", or something along that line.

More to the point, we don't know how an Ion Cannon will affect a Duotronic computer network. Federation computers, the EPS system,

As they are dependent on mantaining a strong EM field to contain the plasma, I imagine it would be devestating for them to be hit by an EMP.

and fiber optic systems,

Immune, but they have their own complications IIRC.

along with most of the isolinear control networks are not electrical in nature. Essentially Federation ships use a type of Quantum computer. Later ships have begun to incorporate bio neural gel as a medium for processing data, but again, we have no way of knowing how a ion cannon designed to short out an electrical system will effect these.

Going from quantum to biological would be a big step down, so I think we can rule out the assumption it is quantum in nature.

During the Dominion war Breen Energy disruptors were able to disable Federation ships, but not Klingon ships; the technology was dissimilar enough that the disruptor had no effect. Later in the war the Federation was able to modify the deflectors to prevent the Energy drain.

Not knowing how it was accomplished makes it kinda moot.

So to sum this up, we don't know what would happen, if the ship would loose power, or if the systems are even affected by an ion cannon at all.

Oh, it will certainly be affected alright. Its just that there won't be any equipment left for the EMP to affect. Like I said, these have a damaging component to them, which makes this question kinda like "Will the farraday cage on pentagon computers withstand the EMP from a multiteraton nuke?"

[Barton]

I have always considered what would happen should a st ship be shot with an ion cannon. I have heard all kinds of claims about what might happen so thus I will hear some opinions first.

Both high frequency EM/photon particles and pion particles (by product of antimatter/matter reactions) has ionising characteristics.